Become Independent: Reasons to Take Care of Yourself Before Others

Helping other people is a great thing to do. Like making other people happy when they have a bad day or if they need help building on a new idea. Some people might be struggling with certain things or don’t quite know how to solve their problems, and helping to give them a solution is a great thing to do. I often find myself making some music for friends games or films as a favor. It can be a way of showing you appreciate them as a friend, or just a way to do something nice.

Giving to charity or doing volunteer work is all in the same light. I have also talked about sharing ideas with others and helping the world grow and progress as a whole in some of my articles. I feel that all of these are great ways to give contributions to the world, and it feels amazing to do it.

So this article isn’t just a list of random things you can do to help others. It’s actually more about helping yourself. A few years ago I found myself doing things for other people quite a bit. It’s definitely a nice thing to do. Help someone deal with their problems, let them borrow things, all of that. And it wasn’t so much that these people were just coming to me for all of their problems or were using me by any means. I was offering help and assistance by my own will. My friends using me wasn’t the problem.

I was Helping others before Helping myself

The problem was that I would offer help to solve friends problems without solving my own first. I won’t go into detail about what I might have been dealing with (it definitely wasn’t me being upset that I didn’t get tickets to the Star Wars VII premiere), but I felt stressed out and unhappy. Everyone has problems that they deal with on a day to day basis no matter how big or small. I was too focused on helping out others and as a result my own problems weren’t being resolved.

By continuously helping my friends, I wasn’t making time for myself and ended up building a tower of unfinished business and unnecessary stress on my shoulders. If you are someone who helps your friends too much, then you can easily commit yourself to a longterm project or task that you don’t care about.

Driving your friend somewhere 2 hours away when really you have homework or need to catch up on some work can really stress you out. I often find myself stressed over having too much on my plate, and adding that extra time of helping a friend or splitting my focus onto someone else’s issue will just distance me from my own conflicts that need to be resolved.

Build on your own Life, then Share with Others

You should build your life and grow so that you can be the happiest you can be, and then share that with others. When you have your problems solved it will be a lot easier to give energy towards others. You can’t pour tea from an empty cup.

If you have realized that you are someone who is not giving themselves enough time, how do you know when you’ve taken care of yourself enough? Well honestly, that depends on the person.

But I’ll just say that for me, after I finish a decent amount of work with a little bit of time to myself to play video games or read, I feel like I can help others without any stress. Like when Venrick asks me to help clean something in the house, run an errand, or asks if he needs stitches on a weird part of his body.

I sometimes will feel stressed out when I haven’t done a lot for myself and I am asked to help other people with certain tasks. But when I do things for myself first and have felt accomplished for the day or week, it really isn’t such a big deal to do and Ifeel good about helping. And even then, there are many situations where you will need a friends help as well.

If I did that task while I didn’t feel fulfilled with myself, I know that I would be neglecting that person right now. Obviously some things aren’t as big of a deal to do. And what I’ve noticed in myself is that the more fulfilled I am, the more time-consuming or difficult of a task I’m willing to help with.

It is a great thing to help others and it can be incredibly rewarding. Just make sure that you take care of yourself first. You and those you care about will be better for it.